We have a few community launches to share this week, plus code changes and preparing for RHOK. Anyone can update the Ushahidi weekly. All you need is a wiki account. Let us know what you are working on or need help with. Here’s our update:

The community developer call is open to anyone deploying Ushahidi or Crowdmap with technical questions. We also provide Swift River updates. Let us know which topics you’d like us to focus on.

We have a community mailing list for general deployment conversations. What is the best method of verification, how can corruption mappers mentor each other? Help vote on deployment of the week. And more.

Congrats to the Kosovo Camp team for winning 1st place with their Ushahidi prototype (The main site is now offline):

Harrnoje (kosovo)

Jorge Luis Sierra and Irma Rodriguez of the Mi Panama Transparente team

Brad Anthony has been a fixture on the Ushahidi community dev chat and community calls for months. He has been learning and sharing as they planned and executed their project. Congratulations to the Global Animal Welfare team for their launch.

Code updates

The Ushahidi website will have a brief maintenance window today (May 17, 2012 at 16:00 EDT). We are doing some back-end changes. (This does not affect deployments.)

There was a change by Google Maps base layers that affects both Crowdmaps and Ushahidi deployments. You will get a pop-up on your map. We’ve contacted Google to investigate. As a workaround, we suggest switching to OpenStreetMap:

Click Settings, then Map

Select an alternate map

We will provide updates via twitter, mailing lists and the Ushahidi dev chat

The Crowdmap team changes including playing with Apigee,an api gateway and Tilemill. It has also been transitioned to a new hosting provider to help with uptime and scalability.

The Ushahidi core team is Angie investigating CSV report uploads/downloads issues and updating custom forms. A Ushahidi core code release is scheduled for May 29th. We will be doing community testing this week. (This will be mainly a bug fix release.)
Swift River has a new UI update which we are testing internally. The beta launch is pending, but we are getting closer. We are also testing an update to the Android (APK.)

Random Hacks of Kindness

Random Hacks of Kindness is June 1- 3, 2012. There are often hacks involving Ushahidi. If you are doing one or would like to, let me know so that can help support it. Generally, we like to support prototypes and projects that can be reproduced in other areas of the world and that are not duplicate work done by others.